The Bodies on the Train

On Monday, a train left the Torez station, in Eastern Ukraine, with the bodies, or parts of the bodies, of passengers of Malaysian Air Flight 17 stacked in its cars. Organizing that departure had required angry statements by the President of the United States and other world leaders, and a spreading, queasy sense of disgrace. For four days, since the plane was shot down, coal miners and other townspeople, as well as some armed men, had gathered bodies from the wide field where the plane fell, shattered on the ground, but they were not trained rescue-and-recovery workers, and there had been a haphazard quality to the collection. There had been two hundred and ninety-eight people on the plane. On Monday, when Dutch forensic experts finally got to look inside the train cars—they were refrigerated but, the BBC noted, “the smell of decay emanating from the carriages was overwhelming”—there were perhaps two hundred corpses. Another few dozen had been in local morgues. Any other human remains, unless incinerated in the crash, were still on the ground, missed when the volunteers picked through the busted suitcases and toys. (A miner handed Natalia Antelava, of the BBC, a Dutch passport and a wallet.) The counts vary, but there may be a couple of dozen bodies, or more, unaccounted for. (Update: On Tuesday, Dutch officials confirmed that there were only two hundred bodies on the train.)

If the Ukrainian separatists who controlled the area where the plane went down had treated the bodies well—or just, as President Obama said Monday, with “decency”—they and their Russian sponsors might have kept a better grip on this story. The scenario was never good: a plane full of people—florists, actors, scientists, small children—who’d embarked in Amsterdam and were headed to Kuala Lumpur, was hit by a missile while flying at more than thirty thousand feet. The evidence so far strongly indicates that the separatists, whom the Russians have armed and trained, fired the missile, and so murdered the people whose bodies they are now picking up and putting into black plastic bags. They have denied it, with extravagant accusations and elaborate conspiracy theories. There needs to be a proper investigation to establish, in strong terms, what happened; apart from the geopolitical implications, two hundred and ninety-eight people are dead. The separatists have spent days keeping investigators from the crash site, trampling evidence into the dirt, or quietly lifting it and carrying it away. President Obama, in his remarks Monday, asked, “These separatists are removing evidence from the crash site, all of which begs the question: What exactly are they trying to hide?”

That is the legal and political question; the emotional one, again, involves the handling of the dead. Secretary of State John Kerry, on “Face The Nation,” said that “drunken separatists have been piling bodies into trucks.” He repeated the phrase “drunken separatists” on a fewmore Sunday shows. The unfinished journey of the Flight 17 passengers has been, as Obama said, “an insult to those who have lost loved ones.” (Desecration is almost the most ancient insult.) They’d been kidnapped without their families having the hope of anything but a funeral. The separatists might deny that they had shot down the plane, but they were blatantly, in front of cameras, stealing it. Parents were on television, asking for their children’s bodies back. Also on Monday, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding access to the site.

The plane’s flight-data recorders, or black boxes, have been on their own murky trip. The separatists had them, and said that they were waiting to hand them over to the proper international authorities—by which they may have meant someone in Russia who could tamper with the contents. It was left to reporters to take pictures of a sheet of the airplane’s exterior pitted with holes. Finally, on Monday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the separatists had agreed to give the boxes to his country’s authorities. He said that a rebel commander had told him that the bodies would come back, too: the Malaysians could have them, and give them to the Dutch. What happened to the plane is such an outrage that the outrageous fortune of it happening to Malaysian Air, of all carriers, has been slightly overshadowed. Two months ago, another Malaysian Air flight disappeared entirely; this one, turned inside out, has been sickeningly visible.

On Monday, while waiting for the separatists to strike a deal, Peter van Vliet, the head of the Dutch forensics team, said, “We don’t know the time. We don’t know the destination. But we’ve got the promise the train is going.” Soon after, word came that the train was headed to Kharkiv, where the Ukrainian government is in control. The weekend of unattended bodies can’t be followed by more days of wandering. They need a return trip home.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.